Life, the Internet, and Everything!

How to Design a Well-Crafted Website

A well-crafted website requires more than just being aesthetically pleasing. Using both proper layout and creative design, you can offer your readers easier navigation to locate the information they are seeking. This will produce a positive impression from your readers concerning your organization while enhancing the users overall experience.

It is important to take the right amount of time to create a clever design and a proper layout that best supports your companys overall goals. This way you can turn the time, energy and money of creating your website into an investment that is worthwhile.

Whether you choose to build your site from scratch, or are reinventing an existing site, the basic design principles that follow can provide the right type of guidance throughout the development process to assist you in creating a usable, focused website.

The Main Topic

It is important to develop a main topic for each webpage. To accomplish this choose the right images and proper text concerning the topic of your choice. On each individual page, identify at least two tasks that you would like your online visitor to perform. These are often called a call to action that could include purchasing, making an order, subscribing to your company email newsletter, or clicking to another page within the site.

An effective call to action strategy will help facilitate your companys goals. It is the simplest way to continue the conversation and develop a stronger relationship between your online visitors and your company.

Develop a Hierarchy

As part of your well-crafted website, you need to develop clear data hierarchy. Organize the data on every webpage so that it has a natural flow, where the eye will travel to the key aspects of the page, which is typically the areas on the page and the ones that serve the company best. This means that the eyes should naturally travel to crucial items on the page, while avoiding the least important products or items.

It is important to use the right formatting to maximize the effectiveness of the site. This means a bold format, with bigger size. Be sure and split the blocks of texts that are larger in size into smaller paragraphs. This will make each area easier to read and comprehend.

Be sure and add headlines wherever possible, in an attempt to break up the page. Always avoid creating long paragraphs, or displaying the text in wide columns which are significantly harder to read and comprehend. Additionally, be sure and add hyperlinks to any other relevant page within your own website. This will provide the opportunity for the visitors to easily move around inside the site to gather the information they require.

The last key component to developing a creative web page that is sure to stand out is to use page elements. This means adding specific buttons including contact us, and about us. Every call to action, or the action that you require of the online viewer should be above the fold and reside near the top.

http://www.mlwebco.com – In this video I talk about the potential career outlook of a web designer in what I call “The Web Designer’s Journey”. The purpose i…Video Rating: 4 / 5

Comments

This video helped me SO much for my career research paper! OMG @ how I am
19 years old at the moment, and looking to this career SO much! That’s
because I have used Adobe products since I was 13 years old! Gosh!<321~

Mike, love this video. I have been freelancing in web design on and off for
the last 10 yrs., but I have a question for you. I have read that tables
are bad for page layouts and div are good. In your opinion which should be
used? If neither then what?

Out of all your videos, this one has the best background and brightness
setting. You should use this for your future videos. And thanks a ton for
so many helpful tutorials, you’re awesome! Really appreciate it.

Great video.
Let me offer a bit of advice for designers. There are certain clients you
will want to avoid. Each of these is based on my 15 years experience:
1) Churches. Many churches operated by committee and so you will never have
good clear direction on what to build or how to update because they will
not agree and the pastor will not oppose them or take the lead as you would
expect. Also, there is ALWAYS somebody in-house who will resent that the
site was outsourced to a professional firm and this person will always be
there working to undermine you. Also, money will always be a factor as you
are dealing with a “non-profit” organization. Do yourself a favor, just
stay clear of churches when prospecting web clients. I like using my
talents to help the Kingdom of God, but I’ll NEVER build another church
site.
2) Personal sites. Focus on providing services for organizations who have
money to pay for your professional services. Building a site for your
neighbor’s girlfriend is not the best way for a professional to spend your
time.
3) eCommerce. These can be highly profitable, but unless you charge by the
hour, these can seriously eat into your time.
IMHO.

Earn Rewards Taking Surveys!

I earn points taking YouGov surveys, and then I redeem the points for gift cards. Each survey takes about 5 minutes to complete, and some of them are quite interesting. You’ll be surprised how quickly points accumulate! Sign up here and start earning points and gift cards for taking simple 5 minute surveys.